


In Memoria Res

by beaubete



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 09:00:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5779708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Memory is a tricky business.  </p><p>After Franz's machine, the cup of Bond's mind becomes a sieve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Memoria Res

**Author's Note:**

  * For [adreaminglamb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/adreaminglamb/gifts).



> I was lucky enough to get to write two stories for the 00Q Reverse Bang again this year, for two very talented artists, this time adreaminglamb! This one was fun because I got to play around with some ideas I'd had after SPECTRE. I think the movie's been out long enough everywhere by now, but if you haven't seen it, please keep in mind that this fic deals heavily with some characters and situations important to that film.
> 
> As always (though I often forget to tag it here), much, much love to littleowls3 for her help with beta reading and general quality improving! I couldn't do it without her.
> 
> A note: Jas is an old fashioned abbreviation of the name James. I thought it suited!

  

 

As it turns out, retirement is slower than he’s expected.  It’s not unpleasant, this slowing down, but it’s as if, in the absence of a loud noise, he can finally hear the creaks of his body as it settles.  He slows enough to hear his own raspy breath, to feel the way his knee protests going down stairs.  Madeleine smiles at him and he smiles back. 

He thought he’d feel more resignation when he retired.  Thought he’d never retire, to be honest; thought he’d fight it a whole lot harder when the time came and he was put out to pasture, but he’s not.  Truth be told, he feels.  Resolved, perhaps.  There’s a kind of mad joy in waking up in the morning and knowing that, while millions of people may die the world over, for once none of those deaths will be his fault.  Even indirectly, his decisions affect nothing beyond whether he and Madeleine go to the restaurant for supper or stay in.  It’s been so long since he’s felt so peaceably insignificant, and it’s hard not to stretch amid the blankets like a smug cat.

Then what to do today?  They’re in Lucerne, right at the edge of the lake, where Madeleine can have her mountains and he can have his scrambled eggs with caviar and they can both enjoy the fresh powder of new snow, though it’s finally gone warm enough that he could wander down to the lakeside and imagine dipping his feet.  Madeleine’s got work to do today; she’s been picked up by a prestigious practice in the city center—Dr Swann again—and James her kept man.  He grins to himself and packs his trunks for the lido.

As a last moment thought, he realises—he has a book here somewhere, something cribbed from the back of the DB10 before he’d dropped it in the Tiber.  It might be a thing worth reading, perhaps, and he digs through his bags until he finds it: a slender volume of poetry.  It’s clearly not his; he wouldn’t have bought something so sentimental.  It’d been on the passenger seat when he stole the car, and again Bond wonders what was the purpose?  Q’d made a playlist, an honest to god playlist, for 009, and this thin book of poems—had he interrupted Q’s attempt at romance?  But that’s some months gone, nearly three now, and if that’s what Q was wanting, surely he’s taken a different tack by now.  Bond finds himself hoping he has; he remembers that lonely smile on Q’s face when he’d come for the car and hopes it’s gone.

But a book is a book and Bond can read it; he likes to avoid the city center this time of year as the tourists come out for their Sound of Music tat and fill the air with that song— _ eidelweiss, eidelweiss _ , and it’s almost enough for him to wish he’d kept one gun, even a very small one—and he knows they’ll ask him questions if he doesn’t look busy.  So he tucks the book under his arm and heads down the few steps from their cosy flat, and in under five minutes he’s got his toes dangling in the alpine runoff, icy enough that the shock of water on his arches makes his toes flex and curl.  It’s perhaps a bit too cold for swimmers, and he has the beach mostly to himself.  When the cold’s clench grows too tight, he retreats up the sand to the grass and cracks open Q’s book.

He falls asleep on the beach, and, on waking, his first thought is pleasure that he can do that now.  It’s pleasure that he can get lost in a book and lose half a day, that he can nap in public and the worst that will happen is a bit of uncomfortable sand.  He nods in greeting to someone passing by—he doesn’t know him from Adam, and there’s a pleasure in that, too—as he heads back to the flat, which is dark and smells faintly of supper.  He can hear Madeleine in another room—“Don’t track wet in the kitchen!” she calls by way of greeting from her office—as he noses through the covered dishes on the stove, helping himself to a cold roastie and enjoying the mealy texture of the potato before swiping a beer from the fridge.  It’s all terribly domestic, and his lips curl around his contentment.

Their schedules haven’t lined up well these last few days; by the time he’s out of the shower, she’s already in bed, warm and fragrant.  She laughs at the drops of wet on her shoulders as he nuzzles in, sleepy and comfortable, and Bond knows: this must be happiness.

::

“Who.”  It’s not a question.  His voice is flat; he manages to keep it from shaking as he contemplates—this woman, she’s not even a close facsimile.  Her hair is the right colour, but everything else is off.  She opens her mouth to speak and he waves her off.  There’s nothing she could say.  She’s not Madeleine.

Her fists clench in her nightdress, and his knots around the edges of the mattress.  It’s something sick; she’s done something sick, wearing the beautiful Swiss lace nightie he’d bought Madeleine shortly after their arrival in the city.  She looks frightened, and that’s satisfying, except that it isn’t.  Except that her eyes are wide and startled, her hair mussed with sleep, and what assassin climbs into bed with you, pretends to be your partner?  Except that there’s something so damnably familiar about her, a wisp of song half-remembered, a waft of perfume from the other room.  Someone he’s met a long time ago.  He feels sick; he presses his fingertips in against the edges of his skull, where incisions too small to need stitches have healed months ago.  There’s an ache like a bruise inside his head.

“I’m sorry,” he says.  “I—it was a nightmare.  A flashback.  From work; I forgot where I was for a moment.”  Forgot who she was, though he won’t say that, and when he looks at her again, her face is filtering in in a distant way, like that of an aunt he’s met when he was very young or the maid in his dormitory at Eton.

“James.”  And her voice is wrong, too, but just faintly.  Was Madeleine’s accent ever so thick, so lyrical?  Was her voice ever so husky?  He smiles and knows it’s thin.

“I’m fine, darling.  I am.”  He will be.

It happens again.  Of course it does.  One day he comes home from the market to a strange woman who greets him warmly, kisses his cheek gently, and hands him a scotch prepared just the way he’s always preferred it.  He recognises her again at supper as she stands over the pan on the stove and sips wine, face hot with steam and curled tendrils of her hair escaping in flickers around her face.  The woman stays away for weeks and is back one morning, skin dappled by the light fluttering in past filmy curtains over the bed, but it’s Madeleine fresh from the shower half an hour later.  It isn’t until he tumbles Madeleine into bed and finds the woman beneath him that he frowns, drawing back, and realises he must do something.

When he finally screws up the courage to tell her what’s happening, she weeps.  She’s been in bed with a stranger these last weeks, and worse, a stranger who’d let her assume their familiarity.  He tries to explain—he’d thought Blofeld’s machine had failed.  There’d been no immediate effects, nothing besides a mild headache at first that had eventually faded as he’d healed.  And they’d both had rather more important things going on, hadn’t they, besides going to see the doctor?  He’s put it off this long because he didn’t want to be a burden—here she shouts at him, calls him liar and a thief and a fool—because he didn’t want to face the potential damage, because he is, in many ways, still a coward.

“I’m sick,” he tells her.  She understands.  “I must go home,” he tells her.  She understands that, too.  “If I leave you here, I probably won’t recognise you ever again,” he tells her.  She understands.  She stays.

::

It would be misleading to say that MI6 welcomes him back with open arms.  He’s skipped the important bits, all of the recovery after the damage wrought by SPECTRE and by C, and there’s no mistaking the resentment in Eve’s eyes even if he mistakes her at first for Judy in payroll.  Truth be told, he doesn’t honestly remember Judy from payroll, only knows that this woman, beautiful though she is, could hardly be the Miss Moneypenny he’d worked so closely with in Turkey; he plucks a name from thin air, and he’s not surprised to hear that Judy is a mousy young woman with a forgettable face.  He probably wouldn’t have remembered her even without Blofeld’s help, if he’s telling the truth.  He recognises M, though, and it only takes a second for Tanner’s features to settle into something familiar, though it’s a long second and Bond bites his tongue before greeting him just to be sure.

He certainly won’t be an agent again.  There’s no way they’d let him, not when the possibility looms that he’ll forget his target’s face in the crowd and kill the wrong person.  As it stands, he’s shifted more or less permanently into a room in the long term treatment wing in Medical—he hasn’t got a flat anymore, though it’s him that’s sold this one out from under himself, so sure that Madeleine and Lucerne were a sure thing, that they were it.  They could have been, he supposes as he tucks the single bag containing what’s left of his life into the bottom of the chest of drawers, except that Franz had got in the way again, leaving James on one side of the ravine and his happy ending on the other, watching the schism grow wider.  It doesn’t warrant contemplation.  Navel gazing won’t resolve it any more than wishing on a star.

He still has Q’s book, though, and through the long battery of tests, he finds himself flipping through the pages, each poem familiar and worn as a comfortable pair of shoes.  He reads it twice more, and then, because it suddenly occurs to him he can, he jots a note in the cover:

<< Finished with this one; send me something more interesting, would you? —Jas >>

He sends it off with one of the nurses’ aides and waits around for her to come back.  When she does, he’s not disappointed; her smile is wry as she hands over another book, this one with a sticky note affixed to the cover.  He can read Q’s outrage in the heavy press of lines written on the note, though Q’s handwriting is sloppy enough he can barely read it.

<< You WROTE on my book!  Have you no respect for the written word?  Or other people’s property?  Wait, ask a stupid question....  Against my better judgement, here is something else to keep you occupied whilst you’re not out burning down foreign regimes. —Q >>

The signature can only be described as cute, the Q so askance it looks like a lolly, the little tail sticking directly down.  It resembles the power button on Bond’s laptop, and he laughs a little, at least as much at Q’s ingenuity as at himself and the wave of relief he feels.  He hadn’t expected Q to forgive him, not really.  Then again, he never expected it before and it’s always come; he doesn’t know if it’s himself he was doubting or Q.  Perhaps he’d gone too far, Lucerne so distant it feels like a fairy tale now, full of quaint timbered houses and shops with crystal windows and the storybook lake in the center.  The happy ending he’d never fully believed he deserved, and of course he’d been right.  

His life consists of these small rooms now.  He can leave, of course.  He’s not a prisoner.  But he finds there’s nowhere he wants to go, not while he’s still licking his wounds over his happily ever after dissolving like a cloud beneath his feet.  Not while there’s a fifty percent chance he won’t recognise his nurse when she walks in to check up on him; there’s no way to build a life when the foundations crumple inside his broken brain every few days.  He could leave, sure, but where would he go?

Q’s book turns out to be a fiction, some sort of daring spy novel.  Bond reads it in one go and frowns to himself when it’s done.  He hadn’t thought Q enjoyed such fluffy reading material; the pen is in hand for his next readthrough even before he knows what he plans to do.

<< This all sounds rather implausible to me —Jas >> he writes next to a passage about Rick Dashing, super spy, scaling the outside of a business office in Beiping.  << Spells his name with a silent ‘P’, eh? —Jas >> he jots into a scene where Rick bends a lady’s husband’s arm up his back to make her confess.  << Doesn’t work like that —Jas >> goes next to a segment about defusing a bomb, even though he knows Q knows that.

He returns the book by nurses’ aide again and gets a telling off from the head of Medical for wasting resources; it’s bad enough he’s still here taking up any at all when he’s a grown man who can care for himself, he says, though the lecture loses some of its sting when he doesn’t recognise the man’s face an hour later.  It’s hard to feel resentment toward someone you can barely remember within minutes of the confrontation, though he could do without the contrite lowing.  He has a disability, one which he is only just beginning to see the full shape of, and while it certainly does reshape his life, it’s not the only part of him.  He can remember distantly a time when he was just as disliked here for different reasons, except it’s harder now to seduce the nurses when the only part of them he recalls are their name badges.

The next book travels by boffin, the harried boy standing in his room when he gets back from his daily walk up the South Bank.  The boffin opens his mouth to speak when Bond comes in, but Bond beats him to it.

“You’re one of Q’s,” he suggests, and the boffin just looks at him strangely.

“They’d said you forgot,” the boffin says, then shakes himself.  “Er, yeah.  I’m from Q-Branch.  I’ve got another book for you, and a bill for the last.  Q was a little irate at what you did to it.”

“Was he?” Bond asks, humming.  The book he receives is another in the same series as the last, the adventures of Rick Dashing, gentleman super spy employed against the Vietnamese this time.  The illustration on the cover is vaguely racist.  Bond chuckles, turning it over to read the blurb on the back.  “Tell him he’s got shit taste in books, would you, kid?”

The boffin just laughs.  “Tell him yourself.  I’m sure he’d be glad to see you.”

It’s ice in his veins.  Bond shivers, frowning to himself, and tucks the new book away in the nightstand.  “No.”  He remembers the sad, hopeful smile on Q’s face that last time, remembers how he knew just what it meant and had ignored it anyway.  “Anyway, if I’m paying for the other book, I want it back.  Tell him that, at least.”

The boffin makes a quiet, amused sound.  “I’ll see if he wants to send it back.”  He accepts the note Bond presses into his hand, a tenner worth two of these shite books, and ducks out the door when it’s obvious Bond’s finished with him.

That night, Bond dreams he remembers the exact plummy shade of Q’s lips.

::

He gets the book back in the morning, just before his daily walk.  It appears on his nightstand, and he means to nudge it over to grab the second volume when the sticky note bookmark catches his eye.  When he cracks the cover, he’s surprised to find the margins full, responses to his own comments jotted in in pencil beside his ink.  The sticky note is wry.

<< I suppose if you insist on ruining books this way, it’s better they’re your books.  Your fee covered the next two installments in the series—I suppose you’ve worked out they’re not quite expensive.  Or I run to Oxfam on Thursdays; let me know if you’d prefer something else. —Q >>

Bond spends the afternoon by the Thames, watching the flat-bottomed barges and the duck cruises go by.  Though the South Bank is usually full of tourists, for now this little patch of it is quiet.  Further down the way he can almost make out the Eye—he’s nearly too close to see it—and he knows that Westminster will be swarming.  Later in the evening the National Theatre behind him will be busy—there’s some popular actor doing a show that’s gained enough positive buzz that it’s penetrated even Six’s thick stone walls—but currently, the concrete ledges are fairly muted; the solitude is only broken by the footfall of the occasional jogger.  There’s a city around him, of course there is.  There’s no mistaking it.  Even so, he can almost reach the edges of that contented thing that held him in its arms in Switzerland.  His fingertips brush it and it skitters away.

Q’s filled the book with little notes, rebuttals to his own or comments— << Don’t get any stupid ideas —Q >> comes after a passage describing Dashing’s boomerang pistol—and there’s a lovely photograph tucked between the pages when Dashing gets to Tibet; it’s a personal photo, inexperienced and a little blurry, and Q’s note on the back explains he’d gone on a gap year, the last time he’d flown before rushing out to Altaussee and Bond’s own piloting skills had reinforced his terror of planes.  There’s a thumb in the shot.  Bond is still smiling on his walk home.

To his disappointment, the next book doesn’t have notes in it yet.  Bond’s own notes are halfhearted—he still wants to see what Q will say, but there’s nothing in particular to grab him in these antique spy stories left over from the Cold War.  On the last page, he pens in a quick note to Q: << Go ahead and surprise me for the next one—I want to know which book is your favourite and why.  Book reports would be appreciated. —Jas>>

He doesn’t dare send it along by nurse again, and it’s still easy enough to break into Q’s office.  He leaves the book front and center on the work desk where Q can’t miss it in the morning.  He doesn’t see anyone on his way in or out, and he’s not sure whether he likes it better that way.

::

Q’s next offering is a kids’ book, a Roald Dahl book Bond doesn’t remember at all from his own childhood.  It’s something about witches—well, it’s called  _ The Witches _ , after all—and Q’s note on the cover makes him laugh— << Not a librarian. —Q >> —almost as much as the book itself.  Children who smell of dogshit and witches who turn them into mice; it’s clearly as formative a book on young Q’s mind as any children’s book could be.  It’s full of little notes—there’s a doodle of a mouse circus on one page, the speckled bald head of a witch on another—and it isn’t until he gets quite late in the book to a jam stain that looks like it’s melded with the paper that he begins to realise this might not be a secondhand book after all.  It makes a lump swell in his throat.

He can’t write in this.  He can’t write in Q’s childhood favourite book; he checks the title page and it’s not even a reprint.  He could stop off at the shops and get sticky notes of his own—Q’s own comments and doodles are in pencil, after all, and easy enough to remove from the paper, though it’s delicate and the corners are beginning to crumble on the thirty-three year old book—but another thought occurs to him.  He spends the day in a secondhand shop in Bloomsbury, then, digging.

He returns with a different, older kids’ book, and this time as he pens in a careful response to Q’s book, he’s careful to point out << You don’t have to dredge up relics from your childhood just to find more books for me to read.  Haven’t I damaged enough of your tech that we don’t need to move on to fond totems of your youth? >>  He’s just as cautious as he gently rubs out Q’s marks in  _ The Witches _ with a gum eraser, though he leaves the doodles and even carefully traces the mouse circus into his own book, however little it applies there.  As for the book itself, there’s a certain sort of nostalgia in reading it again to take the piss, but there’s nostalgia in making fun of it, too.  He’s grinning to himself as he heads down to Q-Branch to drop it off.

Q’s office is locked when he gets there, and he doesn’t want to break in again.  Apparently Q’s chased everyone off to other wings of the department to work on other projects, or else everyone’s gone home.  Bond finds a solitary boffin alone in the break room inhaling a chocolate biscuit over the sink; there’s a strong cup of milky tea at his elbow, and Bond waits patiently for him to finish before waving hello.

“Oh!  It’s you again!” the boffin says after half a cup of tea.  “Missed dinner, sorry.  How can I help you?”

Bond grins.  “Got another book for Q, and returning the last one.”  He lifts the books just high enough that the boffin can see them, then lowers them.  He doesn’t want to get—

“The Famous Five?” the boffin asks, and there’s just the curl of a laugh at the edge of his mouth.  “D’you think he’s been meaning to read it?”

“Actually,” Bond tells him imperiously, “in the books they’re just ‘the Five’.  They weren’t famous until the television show, you know.”

“Ah, well, I don’t figure Q’s old enough to know the difference,” the boffin says, and Bond’s grin actually escapes at that.

“Is he a baby face like you?”

“I’ll have you know I’m not far from forty.”  It’s not said in anger, just the feeling of an old argument shared lots of times.

“Really!”

The boffin’s smile is smaller, then.  “Yes.  You’ve missed a lot, being gone as long as you were.  Nearly a year, I’d say.”

And there’s a thought forming in the back of Bond’s mind, a familiar taste on the tip of his tongue, but he smiles wider, shaking it away.  “Yes.  But these are for Q—can you get them to him?”

“Can do.”  The boffin—? Bond’s mind catches a little, dredging something up from the past it can’t hold onto, a slippery-scaled fish that disappears before he can get his hands around it—nods agreeably, taking the books.  At least he resists the urge to peek inside until Bond’s gone.

It’s not books that come back, though he wasn’t sure it would be; there’s a letter, a proper letter, folded neatly against his pillow.  Bond tucks it into the Rick Dashing book he’d got at the shops—Rick Dashing headed off to Leningrad to stop the Reds this time—and sits at the edge of the Thames for an hour before he decides to open it.  It’s.

Well.  It’s addressed to Lucerne, for one thing, and it bears a stamp but not a postmark—never mailed, though the corners are worn as though someone’s spun it between clever, sturdy fingers whilst deciding how wide to crack open his heart.  He imagines, now, Q pursing his lips as he considers, though it’s in abstract.  He doesn’t remember Q.  He can’t remember Q.  His mind slots in the boy he met the other evening in Q-Branch and it doesn’t work, not quite.  He ends up uncurling his fist carefully around the crushed edges of the envelope.  He barely remembers the boy, anyway, only that there’s something instantly familiar about him.

The letter is everything he’d known it would be at first sight.  Q’s messy handwriting fills the page, dipping off the lines in places where his train of thought kept going despite the limits of the page.  There’s a quicksilver mind captured on the page, and longing, and hurt, and loneliness.

<< Come home, please, James, >> begs the letter, << and let me pretend you don’t know I love you. >>

And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it?  Because when he thinks back to Q, he remembers him in fragments: in the disappointed bow of a pink mouth; in the heavy dip of brow as he concentrated on a problem; in the flash of his fingers as he typed through a solution, as he destroyed Blofeld’s plans, as he saved the world; in the.  In the bob of curls on his head as he teased Bond about his childish books.  In the infinitesimally small catch in those flickering silver-green eyes when Bond hadn’t recognised him.  In the careful notes he’s been writing in the books’ margins, in his wry humour, in his sweet, uncomplicated offer of friendship.  Bond’s stomach hurts.

There’s no book to send back this time.  There’s.  How does he—?  He continues his walks but there’s nowhere to go.  He reads, but nothing sinks in.

It takes him three days to work up the nerve to try Q-Branch again, and when he does, it’s busier than he’s seen it in the last several visits.  There’s some kind of operation going on, a minor one as it’s just a few important-looking people huddled around the desk at the front while the techs hustle around them in clusters.  There’s a man, milk-faced and pale and balding—Bond’s brain slowly filters in enough detail to remember, and once he’s identified Tanner it only makes sense that the woman, thin and elegant in a brightly-coloured dress that fits like a sheath around a stiletto, must be Moneypenny.  The dark-haired boy with them—“I’m not far from forty,” a blur in his memory reminds him—must be.  Must be.

“Q.”  

The boy freezes, and Bond knows he’s right, even as Q turns back to his job.  He waits patiently until Eve comes over, and perhaps she’s meant to chase him off, but when she looks over him, something in her expression changes, softens.  She leads him to the break room and the tea set he knows is Q’s own; they drink their tea in silence and then she leaves just as quietly.  He’s not surprised when the door opens a few minutes later and Q comes in, nervous and fidgeting.  Bond’s already made him a cuppa, the mug he’s used proudly displaying the best word scores for Scrabble on the back.  Q’s mouth twists a little at the sight of it.

“Figured it out, then?” he asks.  Bond nods.  “I wasn’t trying to hide it, you know.  I guess I—well, I wanted to know, didn’t I?  If you’d remember me.”

“I didn’t.”

Q’s frown deepens, wobbling as he tries to force it into a smile.  “I know.”

“I don’t remember Madeleine, either,” Bond offers.  Q doesn’t seem surprised to watch him close the door, and when Bond pulls out a chair at the kitchenette set for him, he sinks into it.  “I—her face.  It’s completely gone to me.”

“You remembered how I take my tea, though.”

Bond starts, then pauses to wet his lips.  When he begins again, it’s slow.  “I didn’t—we didn’t, the medics and me—didn’t think there would be any real effect, nothing worth following up on.  I mean, they hurt like hell going in, Blofeld’s drills, but the holes were small.  Didn’t even need any stitches, you know, and they were healed up quite quickly.  I didn’t have any symptoms at first, just a headache that went away once the holes had closed up.”  And he’s said this much to Madeleine; this much he’s said out loud.  He continues.

“About three months into retirement, I began to, to not remember.  Not Madeleine, not at first, but I discovered I couldn’t remember M’s face anymore, the one when she’d shout at me.  I’d forgot my parents’ faces a long time ago; that’s just part of getting older, I think.  By that point I’d been without them four times as long as I was with them.  But suddenly I couldn’t remember her face, and the more I considered it, I couldn’t—things blurred a bit, at the edges.  

“One morning I woke up with a strange woman in my bed with me.  I demanded to know who she was, who she worked for, had she—what had she done with Madeleine?  Except that she was Madeleine, and sometime overnight I’d forgot what she looked like entirely.  Then I recognised her again, just like that.  It came and went; I learned to push down the first response, that initial panic, but.  She could tell that something was wrong.  It was the lying, more than the fact I didn’t recognise her, that upset her.  Pretending I knew who she was, going to bed with a stranger every night.”

“So you came home,” Q says quietly.

“So I came home,” Bond agrees.  “Even though I loved Lucerne, even though I’d felt a peace there I’d never felt before; I didn’t have someone to share it with, and so I came home.  I couldn’t pick her out of a crowd now, you know.  She could be sitting in the other room and I’d have missed her.”

“You must be so lonely.”

Bond thinks about that, because he doesn’t feel lonely.  This boy in front of him is pretty, dark curls tangled around his ears, fog-coloured eyes framed in thick, dark lashes behind geeky specs, a wet, red mouth that’s curled in contemplation.  “No,” he decides.  “There’s something peaceful in not knowing anyone around you.  If I had to come up with a place to live like that, I think it would be London.  Every person I see every day has his own life, is lost in her own thoughts, and being outside of that—there’s something nice about it.  It could be lonely, I think you’re right, but somehow it isn’t.

“It’s only faces, you know, that are affected.  It’s retroactive; faces have been scrubbed from my memory all the way back, and I remember people in parts, like seven billion jigsaw puzzles that keep getting jumbled each time I look away from them.  But some parts I know, even if I can’t find the rest of the pieces.  And anyway, I remember the books I read.  Words aren’t a problem for me.

“I’d bet I’d recognise your words, Q.  How can I be lonely, then?”

Q’s smile is tremulous, and Bond recognises that even if he doesn’t remember this face, he knows how to read it; there’s a delicacy to the situation, a caution needed to his step here.  “The doctors think it’s tied to my emotional state—the more powerfully I feel about a person, the less I remember of them,” he posits thoughtfully.

“How much do you remember about me?” Q asks, and from his own wince Bond can tell he didn’t mean to.  His hand is warm under Bond’s.

“I remember you looked sad when I left.  I had a strong impression that I’d hurt you, when I thought of you in Lucerne.  I remembered the colour of your mouth.  Your handwriting.  I remembered your words in a stranger’s voice, and when I saw your face it was like I’d never seen you before in my life.”

Q’s breath shivers out of him at that.  His fingers curl under Bond’s, and Bond wonders if he’d ever even known this boy before he forgot him.  The boy in front of him is pretty, with fashionably mussed hair and eyes damp with emotion.  His eyes dart behind his glasses as he tries to get the full of the situation, and when Bond presses his lips into the palm of one clever, sturdy hand, those pink lips part around a sigh.


End file.
